


Just Another Alien Planet

by Yvi



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Banter, Community: jacksamfriends, Friendship, Gen, Teamwork
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-14
Updated: 2009-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-02 16:09:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yvi/pseuds/Yvi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are on another alien planet. Stuck in another cave. With another puzzle to solve. This is getting old very fast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Another Alien Planet

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Cnidarian for beta-reading.

"So, any ideas on how to get us out of here?"

Sam took a moment to ponder the situation before answering. They were stuck in a cave, separated from the rest of the team and completely unable to communicate with them thanks to the metal lining of these strange mountains and the way it interfered with the radio signals. It didn't look too good. "None yet, sir."

"And now we wait until they come and get us?" The colonel was wandering around the cave, checking every corner.

It was completely rectangular and not very big, only a few yards on every side, so they could see everything there was to it. The cave wasn't empty, there was a table with some devices which Sam had been checking out when the entrance collapsed.

Sam looked at him skeptically. "It will take hours for them to realize we are missing. Next check-in was supposed to be in...," she looked at her watch, "six hours and thirty minutes."

He hit his hand against the wall, wincing only a little when it connected with the hard stone. "Dammit! Why exactly did I give Daniel so much time for his explorations?"

Sam grimaced and wandered over to the table again. "Maybe something here can help us get out of here," she said.

"Well, the cave did conveniently collapse while you were touching one of those things."

Sam decided to not comment on that one and eyed the device she had carefully picked up earlier. It was just a round disk, made of some kind of metal that felt cold to her hands, with a few markings on it. They were basically lines, a few of them straight, others curved or curled. Probably a language. For a moment, she wished Daniel were here to help her. It didn't look like any alphabet she had seen before and certainly didn't resemble Goa'uld or the Asgard's runes.

When she picked it up, the ground did not shake and the cave did not collapse a second time. Sam turned it around in her fingers. The back of the piece was empty, the metal an even silver colour, likely iron.

"I doubt it had anything to do with me touching it, sir."

Jack looked at the round piece of metal himself and shrugged. "Doesn't look dangerous, at least. But it's not like everything else we touched over the years that blew up into our faces looked dangerous."

Sam smiled before looking at the table again. There were more very similar disks, seeming to only differ from the one she was holding by the carvings. She picked one of them up.

And regretted it immediately, as the ground started to shake again. Sam and Jack both ducked, covering their heads with their hands to avoid being hurt. The shaking was over very soon, though, and no rocks came falling down from the ceiling.

"What the heck just happened?" Jack shouted.

Sam got up again and looked around. At first she couldn't see any difference in the cavern and thought it might have just been an earthquake, but then she glanced at the wall behind the table. "It looks like the wall moved a bit, sir."

"What do you mean, the wall moved?" He got up as well and joined her in front of the back wall. Before she could reply he saw it as well, though. "Oh, I see what you mean, Carter."

The wall that had before been right behind the table had seemingly moved away from it a few feet. And now that she looked at it in detail, she saw another difference. "Looks like there's holes in it now."

"Holes?" Jack asked, and edged closer to the wall.

There were six round holes at eye-level in the wall now, each about an inch deep.

Jack groaned. "Please tell me this is not a puzzle designed by some advanced alien race to test our intelligence and we will only get out of this cave when we manage to put the round disks into the round holes in the right order."

Sam shrugged and gave the disks lying on the table another look - there were fifteen of them in total and they did seem to match the holes in the wall in size. "Unfortunately, it looks like that's the case."

"Don't these advanced civilizations ever think of something more original to test others?" Jack grabbed a few of the pieces and started to randomly put them into the holes in the wall. They appeared to be magnetic and, as Sam had thought, fit perfectly into the wall.

"Apparently not, sir."

Jack was starting to exchange disks and paused to look at her. "So, how many possible combinations of these things are there?" He continued to exchange round disks.

"With fifteen disks and six holes?" Sam calculated in her head for a moment - that was 15! divided by 9!. Quite a large number, she didn't need a calculator for that. "Even if the direction they are put in is not taken into account, there's more than a million possibilities."

The colonel stopped what he was doing. "Oh dammit! We'd better just wait for Daniel and Teal'c, then. I'm emphatically not spending the next few years in here trying out combinations."

"Sir, I am sure there is a perfectly logical way to arrange these things into the holes. Maybe we should try to figure it out," she suggested.

Her team leader shrugged at first, but then nodded reluctantly. "Sounds better than sitting around looking at the walls for the next few hours." He got up and joined her at the wall again.

"Okay, so at first we should focus on what's different between the disks." Sam put them all on the table next to each other so they could compare them.

"Well, the markings, and... well, that's pretty much it" Jack responded. "Why isn't Daniel here when you need him, huh?"

Sam picked up one of the disks and gave it another close look, "They certainly look like nothing I have ever seen. Though they all seem to be in groups of nine across a disk." She looked at him, desperate for any ideas.

Jack opened his mouth, then shut it again. A moment later, he opened it again. "Maybe this is a completely dumb idea and feel free to just tell me to shut up, but could this be like on Cimmeria? The Pi thing?"

Sam looked at him, her mind racing. Then she looked at the disk she held in her hand and picked up another one.

"Sir, you're a genius." She picked up two more of the disks and studied the marking on them.

Jack raised one eyebrow. "I am? You're not seriously saying this is the Pi thing again, are you? Because that's not very original either..."

Sam laughed. "No, it's not... Well, actually, it is. Sort of."

"Carter, stop rambling like you are talking about nintendos again and explain," Jack said in the tone he reserved especially for her and Daniel when they started to talk as fast as they thought without really considering that the other person could not read their thoughts.

Sam grinned. "Sir, these seem to be coding for numbers. Every disk has the carvings grouped together in sets of nine, so that's nine numbers each disk. This line here," she raised her hand which was holding one of the disks and pointed to a fine line at the edge, "marks the first number and from there on, it can be read clockwise. So this one here," Sam raised another one, "is e. It starts with a 2, and then we have 7, 1 , 8 and 2 and the next four digits. There's also Pi again."

Jack nodded. "Okay, so how do we know which of these things to use? If they are all some mathematical thingamajig."

If possible, Sam got even more excited at their solution to the problem. "But that's the thing. They aren't all mathematical and physical constants. At least not that I know of. These two here are 67173-something and 83153 and a few more digits, both numbers I can not place at all - they are probably rubbish. Or so I hope."

Sam placed the disks representing e and Pi on one side of the table and the other two on the other side and started to made her way through the other disks, while Jack waited for her to finish. It turned out that there were five disks where she recognized the numbers - e, Pi, the golden ratio, the square root of 2 and the Euler-Mascheroni constant.

"You done?" Jack asked and looked over her shoulder.

Sam shook her head. "I can only find five. They all seem to be mathematical constants, not physical, which makes sense, as the values of the physical constants are dependent on which basic units you use, but I just can't find any of the other mathematical constants I know."

Jack picked up disks that Sam had discarded randomly and looked at them. "Can't we just try it out?"

"I don't really have any idea how to sort them, but yeah, I suppose we could." Sam started to arrange the numbers in ascending order.

"Isn't this an odd disk?" Jack held up one of the disks Sam had discarded.

Sam looked up and inspected the one Jack was holding in front of her nose. "Why do you think so?"

"I might have mis-counted, but it has all numbers from 1 to 9 on it."

Sam stared at the disk in surprise for a bit. She had been so engrossed in thinking about the actual numbers that this hadn't even occurred to her. "Oh God, yes, it makes perfect sense! They must have this one so visitors will know that they need to use a system based on ten digits. How did I not think of this?"

Jack grinned and looked pleased with himself. "Maybe only someone dumber than you could think of it like this," he suggested.

"You're not..." Sam started, but was silenced by him raising a finger in protest.

"Just... take it as a compliment, or think of yourself as Thor and me as you, and... do your thing. I know you want to." He grinned at her.

She smiled, knowing how bad he was at receiving compliments himself, and took the sixth disk out of his hand. "Yes, sir."

It was all perfectly obvious after that - the piece with the mathematical base came into the first hole and the others followed in ascending order.

The ground shook again and a tunnel appeared in the wall to their left.

"Hell, yeah," Jack exclaimed and grabbed his backpack. "Good thing it was us two stuck in here, huh, Carter?" He grinned at her.

"Probably, yes," she laughed and thought about how absolutely true that was - she wasn't sure whether she would've been able to figure it out without him, and even then it wouldn't have been as fast. And as smart as she thought he was, there was no way he knew the Euler-Mascheroni constant.

Jack beckoned her to follow him, gun in his hand. "So let's go and meet the aliens."

END


End file.
